We Scanned 363 Restaurant Websites for ADA Compliance. Here's What We Found.

The Headline Finding

Across 363 sites, the average score was 63.9 out of 100. The pass threshold is 70. 40.8% of sites fall below it. But the average alone understates how polarized the results are.

The gap between average (63.9) and median (80) is the first signal that the distribution is not normal. A meaningful cluster of sites is dragging the average down hard. The standard deviation is 32.8, which is enormous for a 0-to-100 scale. That tells you this is not a population of restaurants all hovering around average. It is two populations mixed together.

The Bimodal Split

The score distribution has two distinct peaks: one at the very bottom and one at the very top. 20.1% of sites scored 0 to 30. 59.2% scored 70 or above. The middle is thin. Very few restaurants score between 40 and 69. The histogram makes the shape clear.

The mode is 90, which appeared 95 times. A large fraction of restaurants got accessibility right. But the sites that missed it did not miss it by a little. They scored near zero. This pattern suggests the deciding factor is not effort level but whether accessibility was considered at all during site construction. Retrofitting is rare; the results cluster at the extremes of what the original build either included or omitted.

The bottom quartile (90 sites, avg score 12.9) averaged 2.9 violations per site. 72% of those sites have online ordering, 26% have overlay widgets, and WordPress (43 sites) and custom-built (35 sites) account for 86% of that group.

What Restaurants Are Getting Wrong

Eight in ten restaurant websites are missing skip navigation, a WCAG 2.4.1 requirement that lets keyboard and screen reader users jump past repeated navigation menus. It is one of the easiest fixes in accessibility, and one of the most commonly skipped.

The two critical violations, missing image alt text and unlabeled form inputs, both affect 27.3% of sites. Where they appear, they appear repeatedly: affected sites average 3.3 images without alt text and 3.6 unlabeled form inputs. The Pearson correlation between violation count and score is -0.625 (R² = 0.391), confirming that more violations reliably predict lower scores.

Problems Cluster Together

Violations do not occur in isolation. Sites that have one critical violation are statistically likely to have others. The heatmap below shows co-occurrence counts: how many sites in the sample have both violations in a given pair.

The strongest co-occurrence is skip navigation with form labels: 80 sites (22.0% of the sample) had both simultaneously, with a Jaccard similarity of 0.26. Skip navigation with image alt text appeared together on 74 sites (20.4%, Jaccard 0.23). The takeaway is direct: if a site has a skip navigation problem, there is roughly a one-in-five chance it also has a critical violation waiting to be cited in a demand letter.

Lawsuit Risk Tiers

Using score thresholds and critical violation status, sites were segmented into three risk tiers. 93 sites (25.6%) land in the high-risk tier: score below 50 combined with at least one critical violation. At an average settlement of $30,000 (EcomBack 2025 Annual ADA Report), those 93 sites represent an estimated $2,790,000 in collective exposure.

The medium-risk group is not safe. A score of 50 to 69 still fails the 70-point threshold, and plaintiffs' attorneys do not require perfect documentation. Demand letters are often sent based on the presence of any verifiable WCAG violation. The critical violation rate for medium-risk sites is still above 41%.

Platform Matters More Than You Might Think

The most striking finding in the platform breakdown is Shopify. Nine restaurant sites in the sample were built on Shopify, and they averaged 26.1 out of 100 with an 89% critical violation rate. Shopify is an e-commerce platform, not a restaurant platform, and its default themes appear to leave significant accessibility gaps when repurposed for food service sites.

WordPress sites (119 in the sample) averaged 55.7 with a 56% critical violation rate, reflecting the wide variance in WordPress themes and plugin configurations. Custom-built sites performed better at 67.1 average and a 39% critical rate. Squarespace (26% critical rate) and Wix (11% critical rate) both outperformed the field, with Wix averaging 88.3 in this sample.

Only 14 sites (3.9%) had zero violations. By platform: WordPress contributed 7, custom-built 5, Squarespace 1, Webflow 1.

Online Ordering and Reservations: The Score Looks Neutral, but the Risk Is Not

At a high level, sites with online ordering (69.7% of the sample) averaged 63.8 and sites with reservation systems (83.2%) also averaged 63.8, nearly identical to the overall 63.9. Adding transactional features does not by itself predict a better or worse score. But the critical violation rate tells a different story.

Sites with reservation systems have a 48.3% critical violation rate versus 26.2% for sites without. Reservation widgets introduce inaccessible form elements: they add input fields, dropdowns, and date pickers that frequently lack proper labels. The average score does not capture this because some reservation-equipped sites score well overall, but the critical violation signal is real.

The Reservation Widget Effect

Feature combinations reveal the highest-risk profiles in the dataset. The worst pairing is a reservation widget combined with an accessibility overlay, averaging just 51.2 out of 100. This combination adds inaccessible form elements via the reservation widget and then layers an overlay on top that does not fix them.

Sites with no transactional features at all averaged 65.3, slightly better than sites with ordering plus reservations (65.9). The ordering-only group (58.3) performs worse than the combined ordering-plus-reservation group, which suggests that restaurants adding reservation systems tend to invest more in the overall build quality. The reservation widget itself is not the problem; the lack of accessibility testing of the forms it introduces is.

The Overlay Trap

20.9% of sites (76 sites) had accessibility overlay widgets installed. These are JavaScript plugins that add an on-screen toolbar claiming to improve accessibility. Their average score was 59.3, which is 5.8 points below the non-overlay average of 65.1. The gap in critical violation rates is larger: 57.9% for overlay sites versus 41.1% for non-overlay sites.

This finding is consistent with broader research. According to the EcomBack 2025 Annual ADA Report, 25% of 2024 ADA web lawsuits targeted sites using accessibility overlay tools. Overlays have also been the subject of standalone lawsuits alleging that the widgets themselves create additional barriers.

The Lawsuit Context

The legal exposure for non-compliant restaurant websites is not theoretical. According to the EcomBack 2025 Annual ADA Report:

Restaurants overtook fashion and apparel as the most-sued industry for web accessibility in 2025. The combination of high foot traffic, online ordering, and reservation systems creates multiple surfaces where accessibility failures can be documented by plaintiffs. Our data confirms this: 25.6% of scanned sites fall into the high-risk tier, and the clustering of violations means that a single demand letter citing one failure often points to several others on the same page.

What Restaurant Owners Should Do

The violations found in this scan are not exotic. They are the basics of HTML accessibility that have been in WCAG since version 1.0. Most can be fixed without redesigning the site.